About

The gallery's founders, Vai Jong Hunken and Alfonso Alday Vergara, both come from Mexico City, offering an exciting perspective on the city’s growing art scene and its place on the international stage. Alday Hunken’s program facilitates a dialogue between Mexico City and Atlanta, giving us a closer look into the complexities of the art scene in both cities. The founders aim to revolutionize the gallery system through “hypercuration”, a term they use to describe their practice of working across a multitude of spaces to provide the best context for each individual artwork. 

Alday Hunken Gallery is dedicated to showcasing contemporary art that explores identity, cultural context, and the environment, providing a platform for artists who challenge traditional boundaries through innovative material practices, fostering innovation, dialogue, and collaboration. The gallery’s mission is to empower underrepresented voices and inspire new cultural perspectives through transformative art. While cultural context is an important aspect of their program, Alday Hunken’s artists emphasize abstraction over figuration, breaking away from the history and potential clichés of identity-based practices and providing context through subtle, material cues and expressive gestures. 

While they do not exclusively represent female-identifying artists, they do make this a critical part of their program and are very much inspired by the Burns Halperin Report, which showcases the aggressive representation disparity that prevails in the art world, and most importantly, by the fact that both founders were raised by strong, highly intelligent women.

 

The Team

 

Vai Jong Hunken

Director, Alday Hunken Gallery 

Vai Jong Hunken leads Alday Hunken Gallery with a focus on discovering and supporting underrepresented voices in contemporary art. He is dedicated to fostering innovation, collaboration, and dialogue, providing a platform for emerging artists who challenge traditional narratives through bold explorations of material and cultural identity.

 

Alfonso Alday Vergara

CEO, Alday Hunken Gallery

Alfonso Alday Vergara is committed to creating an inclusive space where emerging artists thrive. With a strong blend of business expertise and global perspective, he ensures that Alday Hunken Gallery remains at the forefront of showcasing innovative material practices and critical explorations of identity and the environment.